Three Conservative Senators crossed the floor from different Senate groups over to join the Conservative Senate Caucus. Is this a big deal? Not at all. But it's still significant, because it shows how fluid the current dynamics of Canadian politics are, and why the Senate is so useless.
00:00:03.060I assume that you're just as surprised as I am to see Canada's Senate become such a significant story in Canadian politics over the last little while.
00:00:12.860In just two and a half weeks, we have seen three Senators across the floor from different Senate groups over to the Conservative Senate caucus.
00:00:22.480Now, is this majorly shifting the balance of power in the Senate? Not at all.
00:00:27.780You see how the Senate works is that usually people who have already had long and storied careers in other areas of Canadian politics or in business or in art get appointed usually in their late 50s or 60s to be part of the Senate.
00:00:42.000And then they must retire at the age of 75.
00:00:45.140And this means because Justin Trudeau was the Prime Minister for nearly 10 years and also Stephen Harper didn't even fill all the vacancies that he was allowed to fill, Justin Trudeau ended up appointing, I think, around half of what the current Senate is made up of, maybe even more than half at this point.
00:01:04.420And so naturally, many people on the Senate are left-wing political hacks.
00:01:09.360And I say that because there are technically no liberals in the Senate.
00:01:14.800Justin Trudeau appoints people and they join different Senate groups with neutral-sounding names like the Progressive Senate Group, the Independent Senate Group, or the Canadian Senate Group.
00:01:26.040This is all, again, just some marketing to make it seem like he is appointing nonpartisan individuals who are going to lend their wisdom to advising the House of Commons.
00:01:37.660But obviously, that's not actually how it's worked out.
00:01:40.440There are far, far-left political activists on it and liberal insiders.
00:01:45.340But this is still a significant story, even if it's not like the Conservatives are going to be able to start blocking legislation here and there, because it tells you about how the fluid dynamics of Canadian politics are currently going.
00:01:58.460And I think it demonstrates that a lot of people on the Senate are just not happy with the current government at all.
00:02:04.980In fact, the first two people who left to join the Conservative Senate Caucus, I believe from the Independent Senate Group, which is kind of like the mainstream liberal Senate Group, were saying that they are just sort of upset with the lack of action the current government has taken on many major areas of public policy that matter to average Canadians.
00:02:25.180They don't really want to be associated with that anymore, so they joined the Conservative Caucus.
00:02:29.020Now, yesterday, we had Senator Larry Smith join the Conservative Caucus, and this is a little bit more of a nuanced case, because Larry Smith at one time was the leader of the Conservative Senate Caucus before crossing the floor in 2019 to join the Canadian Senate Caucus, which is kind of a, you know, centrist, you know, center-left socially but center-right fiscally group of senators.
00:02:55.860But now he's come back, probably because of the momentum of the other two, and realizing with the Conservatives representing such a large portion of the House of Commons, it feels silly when they're sitting there with only 11 senators.
00:03:10.680Now, I want to bring up what the current breakdown of the Senate looks like, because of the appointment system, the Senate is more rigged than the country music charts.
00:03:19.960This is what the current structure of the Senate looks like.
00:03:23.940We have 46 independent senators, we have 20 Canadian Senate group senators, and we have 18 progressive Senate group senators, and we only have 14 Conservatives.
00:03:35.000There are seven non-affiliated, and then there is currently one vacancy that Prime Minister Mark Carney is allowed to fill.
00:03:41.500Now, this should tell you why the Senate is so useless.
00:03:44.520Now, I understand the value in having some continuity in government, that if suddenly tomorrow the House of Commons is taken over by a new upstart party and they win 100% of the seats, at least you have people who are there representing what past administrations believed in because they are their appointees.
00:04:03.840But again, with so many appointments being given to people who are already 65 years old and they're only going to be there 10 years, or even sometimes people in their 70s, there was that radio show host that was recently given a Senate seat, and he was already like 72 or something like that, or 70.
00:04:19.020And so he's not going to be there very long before he's forced to retire.
00:04:22.720But this is nuts, that there's only 14, less than 14% of the entire Senate is conservative.
00:04:31.260We have 18 far-left progressives, we have 46 liberals, and we have 20 centrists who are probably also a little bit more liberal-leaning.
00:04:42.500This is why we need a triple-E Senate, you know, effective, elected, and equal across the country, because right now we have provinces like Nova Scotia that have 10 senators, and then Alberta has like three or like six or whatever.
00:04:57.900But regardless, the thing about this that's still significant, though, is why didn't these senators not cross over when Justin Trudeau was prime minister?
00:05:06.580And I think that, and I've talked about this in a previous video, I think they were waiting for Justin Trudeau to step down, see who he was going to be replaced with, see if this person was significantly going to change their agenda from what was going on with Justin Trudeau and actually start delivering on, you know, some reforms that average Canadians want.
00:05:26.620And as soon as Mark Carney started pursuing basically the same things, Mark Carney is smarter in how he does it, so I'm going to warn conservatives out there, Mark Carney is not going to implode any day.
00:05:38.880The guy sucks, and we're about to get into some of his absolutely awful MPs' performances in Parliament in just a little bit here, but Mark Carney isn't flashy anything.
00:05:49.180And because he's not flashy, he's not going to explode like a flash in the pan and burn out in Parliament and have a giant scandal take him down.
00:06:18.120And so his wins are also not going to be particularly spectacular, but his failures aren't either.
00:06:24.580He is going to be, in a certain sense, a steady hand for the Liberal Party.
00:06:28.260It's not going to be a steady hand for Canada.
00:06:30.560He might do some certain good things on policy because maybe he's smarter than Trudeau and he's going to try and do a few things that appeal to moderate Canadians and then do some of his more left-wing liberal stuff on the side.
00:06:42.500But in general, though, people need to brace themselves to know that he's not going to be taken down anytime soon.
00:06:48.120But, again, the Senate defections prove to me that underneath the surface, many of these people realize he's not really going to change the Liberals' agenda in any way.
00:07:00.140And so they're not comfortable representing that anymore.
00:07:03.640And so, yes, the Conservatives still only have 14 out of 105 seats, but it's better than 11, and it is indicative of movements inside politics that the Conservatives are representing more of the center these days.
00:07:18.900It's not just to say that they've abandoned the right.
00:07:22.080I think the Conservatives would do well to actually move a little bit more right on several issues like parental rights and immigration and taxes.
00:07:29.020But they represent the center in the sense that the left, outside of the fact that they could get a bunch of people to vote for them because they were opposing Trump, their actual positions are very much only appealing to those who live in downtown urban areas.
00:07:44.100They have a very metropolitan feel when it comes to policy.
00:07:47.940Now, again, they won in 2025 because they didn't even have to talk about those policies because they just talked about Trump the entire time.
00:07:53.960But if there's an election that's about their policies and their vision for the country, they will lose.
00:07:59.800Anyways, now I want to get to some stuff that was going on in Parliament today, and I want to highlight someone who is, I'm not even saying quickly becoming my favorite MP, like I'm shocked.
00:08:13.020I'm not shocked that this person is becoming one of my favorites at all because I used to watch his show.
00:09:03.000He makes very politician-y type decisions.
00:09:06.420I don't like the Liberal Party, but I could probably find you a far more competent-looking cabinet if I looked through who's currently in their caucus and who would do a good job.
00:09:17.000Carney seems to surround himself with yes-men who make him feel comfy.
00:09:23.220And that's very much a trait like Justin Trudeau.
00:09:27.360Surround yourself with people that you just personally like, and then it makes your life easier to do that.
00:09:33.840Anyway, so I also want to cut over to this clip of Andrew Lawton basically confronting a Liberal minister over a particular issue he wanted to bring up.
00:09:43.120Mr. Speaker, baseless smears like that are why these Liberals can't be trusted to regulate speech in this country.
00:09:49.460For years, this Liberal government has determined to censor what Canadians see and say online.
00:09:56.100From Bill C-11, which put the Liberals in control of YouTube algorithms, to Bill C-18, which squeezed out small and independent media, and to their Thought Crime Bill C-63.
00:10:06.760Now we learn in the National Post that cabinet ministers over there are all clamouring over who gets to be responsible for the latest online censorship law.
00:10:14.360So will the minister who gets to censor what Canadians say, please reveal themselves now?
00:10:26.360Even Google agreed that they should do this.
00:10:35.120Google will pay $100 million to help Canadian journalism in this country.
00:10:50.920Notice he never brings up Meta, who said, we're not paying you $50 million a year in order to put Canadian news on our site.
00:10:59.060Because that was what they were doing.
00:11:00.140They're basically saying, you owe Canadian journalists money because they post news articles on your site, which helps drive traffic to your site.
00:11:06.580It's like, yeah, people are doing that voluntarily.
00:11:10.300People like myself, when I used to write articles rather than make videos, I would use Facebook because it's a very easy way of distributing articles to your audience.
00:11:19.000I wasn't sitting there thinking, Mark Zuckerberg better send me a check for all this work I'm doing for him.
00:11:24.720I thought he had built me a platform that was very effective and efficient, and I was happy to use it.
00:11:30.400But the Liberals, because they're greedy and because their legacy media allies are constantly near broke, had to basically try and force Google and Facebook into giving their media buddies money.
00:11:42.780An international U.S.-based company would agree to do that, but the Conservative Party of Canada would vote against this, would prevent deaths from happening, would want to prevent our media from getting $100 million so that there's more local content, more journalists hired in our newsroom across the country.
00:12:09.600His justification for censorship was we get money and someone agreed with us.
00:12:17.520No justification for why people should be censored, just that we get things if we do it.
00:12:23.200And then he's going to bring up morality to Andrew Lawton here, who worked in independent media and was shut down by the government's censorship bills.
00:12:31.820Because it does make it harder to distribute his content and his videos when he will stop being able to upload any of it on Facebook.
00:12:53.660GCS strategies, basically not having to repay any of the money they stole from taxpayers.
00:12:59.640Took in, I believe, around $100 million.
00:13:03.200You know, so all that money is apparently we don't care that much about the value of money because Stephen Gilboa celebrates getting $100 million from Google.
00:13:11.440At the same time, they burn $100 million on nonsense like that Arrive Can app that didn't end up actually working and it was a bad app to be made in the first place.
00:13:20.940Regardless, though, here is their response to why they're not even trying to retrieve the money.
00:13:53.960This should be, you know what, if I would do, if I'm a Liberal strategist and I wasn't working with idiots, I would just say agree with him.
00:14:33.200Mr. Sunshine Baby made a very good point about this.
00:14:36.720What does banning GC strategies even do?
00:14:39.980It's not like a company with, you know, like, with, like, bulldozers and other, like, equipment, heavy construction equipment, and it was building buildings or whatever, and it can't take government contracts for government buildings anymore, or anything that the public sector is investing in.
00:14:57.440And that would be something, because you can't just simply take all those assets and transfer them to a new company.
00:15:07.640GC strategies isn't even, like, I don't even think they have a permanent location.
00:15:12.520They could just come up with a numbered company, a new numbered company name, and then start all this all over again, and then just have the two main guys just kind of be background people for the new group that they work for.
00:15:24.400So that was a good point by Mr. Sunshine Baby.
00:15:26.760Banning them for seven years doesn't do anything.
00:16:31.940Just agree that we should try and get the money back.
00:16:33.960They won't even agree to that, which just makes it feel like they're hiding something.
00:16:37.720Like maybe there's liberals who are taking money from GC strategies in order to get these contracts.
00:16:43.220So let's not look into it anymore because that might not do well if we're trying to retrieve all the money and then we find out some of our own ministers have some of that money in their bank accounts.
00:16:52.460Anyways, but now I want to jump over to yet another clip of Andrew Laudan because, again, the guy's absolutely tearing it up in Parliament these days.
00:17:04.020Here is him talking again or debating back and forth with a liberal in estimates, which I actually like the estimates debates because it's not like question period where you can only go back once or twice.
00:17:13.680You can keep going back at each other in estimates because it will go on for hours.
00:17:31.800The government or government workers, employees have increased by 40 percent since the liberals got in in 2015.
00:17:38.580And that doesn't even count for all of the extra contractors and consultants who don't directly work for the government, but they have government contracts.
00:17:46.200And the thing is, have you noticed the, you know, quality of service going up?
00:17:52.020In fact, quality of service has been going down.
00:17:53.880It's like our health care industry or health care systems all across Canada.
00:17:58.300Alberta, my home province, is a great example.
00:18:00.820We spent the most per capita on health care and we have some of the slowest wait times because the actual quality of care, the wait times have nothing to do with the money thrown out the system.
00:18:10.880It happens to do with allocation of money.
00:18:13.340We don't allocate for front lines and we have bloated to HR departments and bureaucracies and and just managers on top of managers.
00:19:01.020Mr. Chair, my colleague expect that, no, it is.
00:19:13.200I have to love that Andrew Lawton is on a crusade to make sure that every single Liberal minister looks like a complete fool for not being able to answer basic questions.
00:19:26.940These are numbers that should be very easy for people to remember.
00:19:30.240These are not things that anyone should forget.
00:19:32.900Pretty much every MP should actually probably know what the workforce has looked like between different years.
00:19:38.800Because even now, if you know it's grown by 40%, you can probably just, you know, take out 40% of what the current workforce looks like.
00:19:45.560And that's how it, like, you know, to get the number that you're looking for.
00:19:48.800So if it was like, if it's 390,000 now and it's grown by 40% since 2015, it was probably previously around, you know, 275,000.
00:19:58.200But the guy just clearly doesn't have any clue.
00:20:00.580Just like the other guy who didn't even know, the public safety minister, who didn't even know what an RPAL license or a PAL license was, which is a license you need in order to carry a firearm or even own one.